fterh

I was a law student who got sick of legal practice, and found my passion for programming through luck. I actually wrote a reflective blog piece on my journey recently if anyone is interested - https://medium.com/@fabianterh/celebrating-1-year-as-a-softw...

(It's not paywalled and I don't earn a single cent, so I hope this isn't against the rules)

Quarantine is really, really boring, and I wanted to count down to my last day with a way to visualize my progress. I didn't need event names, background images, or fancy functionality. I just wanted something stupidly easy to use that counted down with a visual progress indicator.

I couldn't find any website that had what I wanted, so I built my own.

No, you're not misunderstanding. I guess I made that statement with the implicit trust of AWS so I didn't think to qualify it.

You're absolutely right that if AWS is a bad actor it has access to all the information, but I'm working on the assumption that it's more profitable to AWS to be a good actor than bad.

The trust reason is theoretical - in practice, I would trust most decently large services especially for unimportant marketing emails (main use case).

My primary motivation in doing this was to learn to use AWS and Serverless framework and also because I really enjoy working on pet projects :)

Could you explain why email isn't trusted? It's encrypted (vs SMS) so I'd imagine it's a far more secure way of communicating sensitive information (e.g. bank statements or one time passwords).

No worries, thanks for the feedback (I appreciate all feedback whether positive or negative).

A catch-all email address is actually less complex to build and test, but there are a couple of reasons I chose to use this approach:

1. It seems that in the workflow you described, there is some work to be done in setting up an inbox filter/black-holing the email address too. In a way, my workflow simply shifts this work to the start?

2. I don't think it's laborious because I don't really need new email addresses that often. It's also really easy to generate a new email address imo - no logins or portals required, just email generate@mydomain.com and you get a reply with an email address within seconds.

3. You're welcome to fork it and tweak it for personal use too if you want! :) I'd love that.

Thanks for linking! I would have linked directly to the blog post but I believe it's against the rules of Show HN, so I chose to include a link in the readme instead!

I was born in the 90s so I'm not familiar with the "dream of the 90s" haha - care to explain?

Right now, silently dropped.

Yeah, this is an issue I'm planning to work on. The reason I chose to release it before supporting attachments is that for my use case for receiving marketing emails (this project is primarily for my personal use, rather than as public software), there are almost never attachments.